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WITandWISDOM(tm) - November 15, 2001 ~~~~~~~ THOUGHTS: "It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid." - James A. Michener Source: Awesome Quotes, http://www.coolnewsletters.com ~~~~~~~ SPECIAL THOUGHTS: A few years ago I went for a run through the streets of Berkeley with my friend Dale Larsen. Dale is a clinical psychologist, and although we had been friends for a long time, we had never gone running together before. After stretching, we began to run and had only gone a few blocks when I noticed that Dale reached into the pocket of his shorts, took out a handful of coins, and threw them over his shoulder. The first couple of times this happened, I pretended not to notice. But after a while it began to drive me crazy - so I finally asked him, 'Dale, what is the story with the money? Why are you throwing coins into the street?' Dale laughed and proceeded to tell me about an amazing psychology experiment nicknamed "The Good Samaritan Study." In the study, researchers positioned themselves across from a pay phone and studied the people who made phone calls. One of the first things they discovered was that almost everyone who makes a call looks in the coin return after hanging up to see if any coins happen to be there. The urge is irresistible: You just have to look in the coin return to see if the machine has mistakenly returned your money! This behavior gave the researchers an idea. The next day, they randomly put coins in the coin return slot, so that some of the people who used the phone actually did discover money. The researchers then hired a young woman to walk by the phone at the exact moment that the subjects were hanging it up. When the young woman walked by with her arms full of books, she pretended to stumble and drop them on the ground. Astonishingly, the researchers observed that the people who found money in the coin return were four times as likely to stop and help the woman pick up her books than were the people who found no money in the coin return. They concluded that when we feel good, we tend to do good, which also means that the helping impulse is transferable. In other words, if you do something good for another person, he or she is much more likely to do something nice for someone else, causing one small gesture to result in a giant ripple effect. By Matt Weinstein, Managing to Have Fun, Copyright (c) January 1, 1997, Published by Simon & Schuster (P), ISBN 0684827085, http://isbn.nu/0684827085 ~~~~~~~ THIS & THAT: GLOSSARY OF COMPUTER TERMS Analog: what Ana tosses into the fire Bandwidth: limited by the size of the stage Battery Backup: going in reverse in a golf cart Cache memory: remembering how much you spent Ethernet: used to catch Ether Fixed disk: a broken disk that comes back from the shop Ink jet: a plane used for sky writing Local bus: stops at every intersection Modem: what the gardener did to the lawns On-line: where the birds sit Pentium: the thing that swings back-and-forth on a clock Submitted by Udi Latarre ~~~~~~~ KEEP SMILING: The minister was talking to the Sunday School class about kindness to animals and cited the Biblical references to substantiate his case. "Now let's suppose," he said, "that you saw a bad person cutting off the tail of a cat. What Biblical quotation would you use to tell him of the terrible wrong he was doing?" "I would point out to him," one of the class said, "what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder." Submitted by Sharon Unger ~~~~~~~ TRIVIA: DO YOU HAVE A WEB SITE? See how a search engine views your web site. Is your title meaningful? See how they view the text on your page, to try to judge what the page is about. To try the Search Engine Simulator visit: http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.html Source: Web Evangelism, http://www.gospelcom.net/guide/web- evangelism.html#web |